In a stretch of about two weeks, Maria Burnett ’05 got married, took her final exams, won an asylum case for a client in her immigration clinic, graduated, and moved to Burundi to work for Human Rights Watch. This rush of events was no aberration, since she has always preferred to do things rather than examine events from a distance.

Burnett took as many clinics as she could at YLS and says, "Clinic work was a stabilizing force in my life." She was particularly excited that the Lowenstein Clinic allowed her "to do legal work on issues all over the world." Burnett was the Schell Center student director in her second year and the Lowenstein Clinic student director in her third year. She organized panel discussions on the Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan Pipeline and the genocide in Darfur, among other topics, hoping to motivate people to take action on these human rights dilemmas. "I always wish people would understand more and care more," she says. "But you do what you can."

Burnett didn't take her summers off, either; she used summer funding from the Law School to study emerging areas of corporate liability for human rights violations, to write a report on workers rights violations in Swaziland, and to work with the Federated States of Micronesia on the human trafficking problem.

Her favorite non-clinic class was on legal ethics. "It examined the choices people make in a legal career, how they choose to spend their time, how they think about their self worth and their clients' worth." And Burnett says that as she made her own career choices, "That class was a really important breathing space."

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